The New Zealand-born anthropologist, novelist, and poet Michael Jackson is fortunate in not being a world-renowned musician and dancer. Who would want to be the best-selling recording artist in history, at the price of a disreputable public private life? Instead, his textual community is a circle of readers who have the privilege of looking in on a great anthropologist’s empathic ethnographic research in New Zealand, Sierra Leone, and aboriginal Australia. But this Michael Jackson does not claim empathy. Rather, under perduring influence from Hannah Arendt, he situates human judgment, deep thought, and his practice of ethnography within the world of human interaction. “[E]thnographic judgement abolishes the subject-object split of natural science and replaces it with an intersubjective model of understanding” (261). World views of Kuranko in Sierra Leone and Maori in New Zealand, as much as the philosophies of Arendt, Kant, and T. W. Adorno, have molded this humanistic conception of his profession; frequently he recurs to J.-P. Sartre’s Search for a Method. In this book he uses earlier fieldwork to expound an existential anthropology, which has five themes: (a) human existence is relational, we live in “intersubjectivity,” and our relationships are “dynamic and problematic” (5); (b) the notion of subject is both personal and political; (c) “our humanity is both shared and singular” (6); (d) the language in which we express our lives is inherently separate from our lived reality; and (e) “human existence involves a dynamic relationship between how we are constituted and how we constitute ourselves,” so that “what we know of the world depends on how we interact with it” (8, author’s emphasis). The implication for fieldwork is that to do research among Kuranko is not merely to record the doings of a minority Muslim group in Central Africa, but to fathom Arendt’s “human condition.” Living among foreign peoples on their terms furnishes a foundation for Michael Jackson’s anthropology. Thus does anthropology give a base for philosophizing.
Exposition of those principles constitutes his first chapter. The next four chapters, previously published in the author’s Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and the Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), support and illustrate his philosophical thesis. Chapter 2, “How to Do Things with Stones,” presents an account of Kuranko divination. The author narrates a consultation he had with one diviner, reviews how anthropologists have dealt with the question of verification, and concludes, “beliefs are best regarded as tokens that are manipulated inventively in critical situations to achieve personal and collective goals simultaneously” (46). Divination, then, is as much a creative performance as a story or song; that is why it finds a place in an Introduction to Folklore course. Chapter 3, “Knowledge of the Body,” advocates bringing the body back into the purview of anthropology. Accounts of initiation practices describe “interactions and movements of people in an organized environment [and] the patterns of body praxis that arise therein” (69). An American folklorist will be reminded of the connections Alan Lomax discovered between dance styles and everyday bodily movements around the world. Chapter 4, “The Migration of a Name,” recounts the author’s turn to oral history. His search for the life of a celebrated, legendary ancestor of the local chiefs, including a poem he wrote during fieldwork, leads to the discovery that the African progenitor is an avatar of Alexander the Great. The discovery is not a case for diffusion; rather, it reveals that “certain abiding moral dilemmas find expression in a narrative that knows no cultural boundaries and recognizes no individual author” (87)—a claim that historic-geographic folktale scholars will want to examine. Chapter 5, “The Man Who Could Turn into an Elephant,” treats shape-shifting, not as weird, baseless witchcraft but as part of a legitimate reaction against powerlessness, in a society beset by war and murder. Here and throughout, Michael Jackson turns away from the kind of exegesis so brilliantly carried out in his 1982 book on Kuranko narrative, in favor of a hermeneutical approach: “I would ask old men to tell me what they knew . . . hoping to augment the piecemeal knowledge I had gathered listening to praise-singers or overhearing anecdotes” (77).
The following chapters record the profound effect of the civil war in Sierra Leone, which turned the anthropologist towards “trauma and grief . . . refugee flight and the search for asylum. . . violence and social suffering” (113). Chapter 6, “Custom and Conflict in Sierra Leone,” is a remarkable interpretation of war through the anthropologist’s eyes. Chapter 7, “Migrant Imaginaries,” takes the author to London, where he spends time with Sierra Leonean refugee friends, hears their stories of homesickness, and reflects on the changes in Kuranko mentality, which cause tension between one refugee’s external situation and his inner yearnings. Chapter 8, “The Stories that Shadow Us,” was published in his The Politics of Storytelling: Violence, Transgression, and Intersubjectivity (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2002). The author interviews traumatized New Zealand war veterans and abducted Aboriginal Australians, juxtaposing Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” to support Arendt’s view of the redemptive power of storytelling. In another direction, chapter 9, “Familiar and Foreign Bodies,” explores “the intersubjective dynamics of the human encounter with technology” (192), noting that video games and computers challenge people’s sense of who they are. People who receive organ transplants respond by trying to create some relation between themselves and their donor. Chapter 10, “The Prose of Suffering,” returns to Sierra Leone to hear the story of a young Kuranko woman’s war experience, discussing the several ways we respond to suffering and advocating “restoring to the notion of responsibility a sense of what it means to be responsive” (226). Most moving of all is chapter 11, “On Autonomy, an Ethnographic and Existential Critique,” which returns to his fieldwork in Australia to contrast Aboriginal notions of autonomy (”being independent of government control,” according to one friend) with the notions of the dominating power. The heartbreaking field stories the author recounts here lead him to reject both anthropological and philosophical tradition in the attempt to see clearly people’s efforts to be at home in the world (248). The final chapter, “Where Thought Belongs,” concludes the book with “an anthropological critique of the project of philosophy.” The author urges anthropologists and philosophers to “locate our thinking in the here and now, immersing ourselves in the lifeworlds of others, taking our intellectual cues from their concerns, and conversing on terms that they decide” (254). If Michael Jackson succeeds supremely in doing that, so also do a number of American folklorists: Dorothy Noyes, Sabina Magliocco, Ray Cashman, Elaine Lawless, Henry Glassie. It is a pity that their textual community is separate from Michael Jackson’s; in a time of dissolving boundaries, the two communities could afford to engage each other in dialogue.
--------
[Review length: 1138 words • Review posted on October 10, 2013]